Top Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Provides principal-level technical leadership for scalable learning and skilling platforms. Designs architectures, writes and reviews production software, leads full software lifecycles, and applies Azure, AI, Copilot, Power Platform, and custom solutions. Responsibilities include secure integrations, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, testing, observability, production support, Responsible AI, reusable components, cross-team technical alignment, and engineering mentorship.

Lead technical strategy and architecture for Azure Storage geo-replication, data protection, failover orchestration, and business continuity. Drive cross-team delivery, operational excellence, telemetry, automation, AI-assisted operations, and represent the team in executive and customer engagements.

Provides technical leadership on complex, high-impact engineering projects from design through launch. The role involves architecture, company-wide initiatives, engineering excellence, mentoring technical leaders, and establishing standards for scalable, reliable, secure, observable systems. The engineer will collaborate across teams, communicate complex technical topics, and apply customer-focused decision-making and A/B testing techniques.

Refactor and migrate legacy U.S. Air Force web applications to a DoD software factory with minimal downtime. Build secure, tested software; identify technical debt; improve CI/CD and engineering practices; communicate technical tradeoffs to government stakeholders; and coach government engineers and military developers. The role works remotely with cross-functional teams and includes occasional travel to Air Force bases.

Leads hands-on development of production software while owning application and service architecture. Diagnoses systemic issues across components, coordinates integration efforts, and improves reliability, performance, and incident response. Builds scalable full-stack SaaS applications using Java, Spring Boot, TypeScript, Node.js, and React. Applies AI-assisted development tools, mentors engineers through influence, and makes technical decisions that balance maintainability, business needs, and client impact.

Principal Software Engineer leading architecture, development, and technical strategy for complex software platforms. The role requires designing scalable and secure systems, guiding engineering standards, mentoring engineers, resolving complex technical issues, and partnering with product, laboratory, and bioinformatics teams. Responsibilities include software architecture, React and .NET development, database optimization, REST APIs, distributed systems, DevOps, regulatory compliance, and long-term technology roadmaps supporting clinical and genomic workflows.

Design, develop, and operate highly scalable and resilient Azure VM Scale Set cloud services. Own features from architecture through deployment and operations, solve distributed-systems challenges at hyperscale, and drive reliability, security, performance, disaster recovery, testing, monitoring, automation, and engineering best practices. Collaborate across teams to deliver platform capabilities and customer outcomes.

Principal Software Engineer responsible for cross-cutting architecture, technical roadmap direction, and delivery quality. The role involves developing APIs, databases, UIs, and libraries with C# or JavaScript/TypeScript; guiding AI-assisted development; establishing testing and verification practices; mentoring engineers; improving tooling and workflows; collaborating cross-functionally; estimating work; and participating in on-call support. The position is fully remote with occasional travel.

Develops high-quality software and AI-powered prototypes for national security missions. Responsibilities include architectural design, feature development, automated testing, backlog grooming, sprint execution, API and SDK development, integration debugging, and research involving LLMs, embeddings, and smaller trained models. The engineer independently leads focused efforts while collaborating with product and engineering teams, using modern DevSecOps and CI/CD practices.

Leads technical direction for the Partner Services engineering area while remaining hands-on with mission-critical financial systems. Owns architecture roadmaps, ADRs, observability, reliability, security, technical investment, OKRs, and KPIs across multiple teams. Leads major incidents, drives AI-native engineering practices, partners with product and executive stakeholders, participates in architecture governance, and mentors engineers at every level. The role requires strong payments or banking familiarity, executive communication, and extensive technical leadership experience.

Leads technical strategy and architecture for a multi-team billing engineering workstream supporting payments, banking, treasury, and financial settlement. Remains hands-on while owning architecture roadmaps, ADRs, reliability, observability, security, AI-native engineering practices, technical investment, and business outcomes. The role partners with senior engineering and product leaders, manages high-stakes incidents, strengthens engineering maturity, and mentors engineers at every level.

Provides technical leadership for Azure SQL databases supporting a highly available Azure service. Responsibilities include database performance tuning, reliability and capacity planning, schema changes, data migrations, observability, incident response, root cause analysis, operational automation, and technical strategy. The role partners with software engineers, SREs, and architects to improve scalability, durability, cost efficiency, and long-term service reliability across teams.

Lead technical direction and major multi-team projects for Chainguard Containers. Design and operate secure container build pipelines, registries, distribution systems, and adoption tooling. Remain hands-on with Go development, architecture, code review, observability, and on-call operations. Form roadmaps with product and engineering leaders, make product-level trade-offs, mentor senior engineers, collaborate across teams, contribute to open-source and industry standards, and establish safe AI-assisted engineering practices.

Provides senior technical leadership across engineering teams by shaping architecture, guiding complex software development, mentoring engineers, and driving scalable, secure, and reliable solutions. Responsibilities include hands-on coding, design reviews, API and system architecture, CI/CD and tooling improvements, cross-team technical alignment, project leadership, and partnership with product and design stakeholders. The role is remote with quarterly travel to Tampa, Florida.

Provides principal-level technical leadership across engineering teams, shaping architecture, engineering standards, scalable software solutions, and delivery practices. The role combines hands-on software development with design reviews, technical decision-making, mentoring, CI/CD and platform improvements, system reliability, and cross-team collaboration. It also partners with product and design stakeholders and may lead high-impact initiatives. Remote work is available with required quarterly travel to Tampa, Florida.

Leads the technical vision, architecture, and execution of AI performance, framework, benchmarking, and developer-productivity initiatives. Drives cross-team architecture, resolves complex systems trade-offs, mentors technical leaders, and contributes hands-on through prototyping, implementation, reviews, debugging, observability, and automation. Delivers measurable improvements in model onboarding speed, runtime performance, reliability, hardware utilization, and Azure capacity efficiency across models, frameworks, compilers, runtimes, systems, services, and hardware.

Lead technical direction for Elastic’s billing experience platform. Design and evolve public and internal APIs, build full-stack billing and account-management features, and shape scalable architecture and data models. Improve reliability, observability, deployment, CI/CD, and incident response across cloud services. Mentor engineers, review technical work, influence roadmap priorities, collaborate across Product, Design, SRE, Finance, and Cloud teams, and participate in on-call rotations.

Designs, develops, configures, and supports Edifecs healthcare EDI solutions and transaction mappings. Works with 837, 834, 835, 820, and 270/271 transactions; troubleshoots transmissions, configures validations, and develops Groovy scripts. Leads Agile and DevOps efforts, mentors engineers, supports QA, and designs scalable AWS applications using containers, microservices, and CI/CD. Provides technical leadership, architecture guidance, performance tuning, and stakeholder consultation.

Lead delivery of Unity Engine’s C#/.NET integration, including GC, JIT, AOT, runtime libraries, and compiler toolchains. Define technical vision, improve performance and reliability, guide cross-functional development, communicate roadmaps and metrics, support users, and mentor team members. The role requires deep C# and C++ expertise, compiler knowledge, hardware architecture understanding, and proprietary game engine development experience.

Own the architecture and technical direction of NodeZero’s database platform. Design scalable PostgreSQL systems, multi-tenant data models, graph-based asset models, partitioning, replication, and zero-downtime schema migrations. Establish database standards, governance, and performance practices while writing production code, authoring design documents, mentoring engineers, and influencing teams across the data pipeline.

Lead the design, development, and implementation of low-latency brokerage systems, mentor engineering teams, and ensure high performance of trading applications.

Design and lead development of high-performance networking infrastructure for large-scale AI training and inference in Azure. Architect low-latency, low-jitter communication frameworks, optimize distributed systems, benchmark scalability, resolve complex networking issues, and improve reliability, observability, and performance. Mentor engineers, create technical designs, manage dependencies, and participate in on-call operations for critical services.

Leads the design and development of scalable SaaS applications, including AI-powered features such as semantic search, vector databases, RAG, and LLM orchestration. Provides technical leadership, mentorship, architectural guidance, code reviews, and engineering standards enforcement. Collaborates cross-functionally to translate requirements into robust solutions, champions AI-assisted development tools, builds developer experience tooling, and drives innovation, quality, security, and continuous improvement across the engineering organization.

Leads the roadmap, architecture, security, and organizational adoption of CI/CD and release infrastructure. Designs scalable release gates, hardens supply chains, directs engineers through complex projects, manages severe incidents, and drives cross-functional technical alignment. The role remains hands-on through code reviews, prototyping, debugging, documentation, mentorship, and design reviews while primarily achieving impact through team leadership.

Design, build, and operate distributed storage and file-system platforms for cloud-scale AI training and inference. Architect storage and caching for Kubernetes and GPU workloads, improve performance, reliability, observability, and resiliency, diagnose cross-layer production issues, and lead architecture reviews. Partner across infrastructure, networking, operating systems, and AI platform teams while mentoring engineers and shaping long-term storage strategy.